This is one of those personal preference things, it really is: within the language-learning community, from experienced polyglots who speak half a dozen languages and have been learning languages for 20 years or more you’ll get a myriad of opinions on the matter, some of them polar opposites of each other.  And that’s fine.  They’ve tried a bunch of

things and sorted out what works best for them, and you’ll have to do that, too.  There’s no getting around it: to figure out what works best for you, you’re going to have to try several different methods and styles of learning, you’re going to have to figure it out by testing.  Just like with many other things in life you’re going to have to fail your way to success: meaning the only way to figure out what works is to try a dozen things that don’t, first.

That said, I’d definitely like to give you some guidelines based off of my experience and what I’ve learned and heard from other language learners…

Vocabulary and Grammar

There is a certain minimum amount of basic vocabulary, grammar, and syntax that you have to know to even begin learning to speak and read the language, but it’s probably far smaller than you think.  You can get the minimum down in a few days (you’d be surprised how many words you can learn if you do it properly) and the best way to go about determining what you need to know is to expose yourself to popular media in the language in question (news broadcasts or, better, TV shows and movies with lots of natural conversations between natives) and look up and learn those words you see being used repeatedly.  These will be basic things such as, “the, at, go, is, are, you, he, she, it, were, am going,” etc.  Those things that you have to know to be able to work with a language at all and how to use them (minimal syntax and grammar), you will end up learning, it’s inevitable.  Done.

What Now?

Well, what do you want to do with the language you’re learning? Do you need to be able to, primarily, speak with other people? Do you need to be able to, primarily, read trade journals or technical manuals or news items in the language in question? Do you just want to be able to watch TV shows? What you want to do, what’s important to you, is what will determine how you go about this.

If you want to be able to speak, start speaking.  Hell, you could do that from Day 1 while you’re just getting some basic vocabulary and grammar down, throw yourself in the deep end of the pool, after you get over that initial shock of the cold water you’ll be glad you did it and you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as bad as you thought it was going to be.  Get on a language exchange site or a social network, find native speakers, or find some locally if you can, and START TALKING!

If you want to be able to read, start reading.  If you want to be able to read news items and general books, then use the method I described above, acquire those items, and start reading them–like I said, it might take you an hour to finish a single page, but you will learn FAST if you’ll do this and stick with it.  Same thing goes for if you want to be able to understand trade publications or more technical information: get the sort of material that you want to be able to read, pull up Google or an online dictionary (for Spanish I highly recommend SpanishDict) and get to work.  You’ll get faster and faster and faster as you go along, and won’t take as long as you think to get to a respectable rate of speed.

In Summary…

Notice a pattern here? Whatever it is that you want to do, the best way to learn how to do that is to start doing it no matter how bad you are at it to begin with! Just go, dive in, kick your own butt, make yourself do this–it’s not as scary as you think, you can do it!  I know I keep repeating this, but so many people want to procrastinate and delay and “prepare” by reading grammar books, doing verb conjugation workbooks, memorizing “just a few more words” before they’ll finally “be ready” to start speaking with native speakers: don’t do that, JUST GO!

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

Frankly? None. You can learn all the grammar you’ll ever need for anything other than passing a test on grammar via context–meaning that you’ll learn how to say things correctly simply from trial and error: speaking with native speakers, making mistakes, and being corrected; you don’t need to know what it’s called when you correctly use the subjunctive, knowing what the subjunctive is is not a prerequisite to using it properly.  When you speak English (or whatever your native language is), can you actually explain everything you say in formal grammatical and syntactical terminology?

No, very few people can, but you and every other native speaker can still speak, read, and write at a very high level of fluency with very few if any grammatical errors, right?  You’ll never need to know actual formal terms for the concepts that you’re learning, you needn’t know the difference between the preterit and perfect subjunctive…however, it may be worth the time it takes to learn a minimal amount of it simply so you can understand verb conjugation charts and any exercises you may do online or in workbooks if you’re trying to learn how to read and write the language – I would recommend that you know what the difference is between the present tense and the preterit tense, in other words.

However, if all you want to do is learn how to speak, then knowledge of this stuff is the least useful, and even if you’re interested in learning how to read and write it’s still only slightly more useful.

I’ll put it this way: the best way to determine what you need to learn is to simply dive into the language and then look up anything you find that you have to know as you go along.  For example, if you’re using a workbook and they mention the ‘preterite’, and knowing what that word means is vital to you learning what you’re trying to learn, then go look it up, otherwise don’t.  In other words, let necessity dictate whether you bother learning something or not.

If you want to just quickly learn the basics, two great resources that you can get through in under an hour and continually reference are:

The Simple English Wikipedia article on Syntax, and

The Wikipedia article on Spanish Grammar

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew